GANDHI.

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LX, Issue 10697, 16 October 1931, Page 4

GANDHI.

THE BIGGEST BLUFF IN HISTORY, IMPUDENT HUMBUG FALLS FLAT IN LONDON. Nemesis is near Mahatma Gandhi. England is seeing him for the first time as ho really is—stripped of his impudence, his humbug, his cunning subterfuge, and his Uriah Keep humility—the greatest bluff in history. England is discovering by insight what 00,000,000 of India's masses found only through bloodshed and his treachery—that “Great Soul” Canhi is a. sham, a putty saint Gandhi is now fighting desperately in London to maintain his pose of ' mysticism and prophecy, so laboriously built up over a lifetime. It is the fashion to call Gandhi a saint. Doubtless he is, if self-impos-ed hardship, denial, and asceticism can induce sanctity. But he was once a politician, and the taint and odor of spccioiisness and insincerity are all around him. The viceroys and administrators of India as well as 60,000,000 “Untouchables,’’ found him out, but the rest of the 300,000,000 still had faith. That is why Gandhi still rides the crest of Indian emotionalism, and cunningly knows himself safe there at least. But he is conscious of failure in Britain. To receive distinguished statesmen and diplomats, Gandhi sat on a hay mattress, half naked, with his lean legs criss-crossed underneath him, his fingers alternately toying with a spinning wheel, and picking his toes. With his lean, bronze-like body, shaven head, ascetic features, toothless month, deeply melancholy eyes, and spiritual mien he was playing the role of a living Buddha, or a reincarnation of Rama, Hindu God of Gods. But once the laborious bluff was called. The British sense of the ludicrous found him out. The banality of his remarks the emptiness of his platitudes, the impudence of his ritual, soon brought a revulsion. Among the London colony of educated. polished, intellectual Indians no less loyal than he, and just as glowing with zeal in the cause of India’s freedom, Gandhi seemed a coolie. London grew frankly fired of him. The bubble of his mysticism once pricked, he remained a bore. The pose had failed. Gandhi came to England in a blaze of publicity, preceded by strange stories of his piety and steadfastness Curiosity was piqued by this gaunt, fakir-like man, who strode through i cold and wet and fog in his loin cloth and blanket. Gandhi usually maintains his pose so well that his insincerity and speciousuess do not betray him at the moment, hut the pitiless logic of events ■finds him out. He awakens forces too big for him. This is what he has done in India —stirred a seething fury of revolt, then found it too much for him. The pretended Hindu-Moslem peace disolves at intervals in a torrent of blood. • For those of a pretended spiritual pacifist, Gandhi’s political methods have been singularly~provocative and irresponsible. Nothing stamps Gautlhi more plainly as the commonest bluff than his trickery with the 60,000,000 Untouchables, India's doomed children under the caste system. * “Hindus must hang their heads in shame as long as the curse of Untouchability persists,” said Gandhi, the "deliverer of India.” “Untouchability is for one more insufferable than British rule.” Then the unscrupulous, cunning politician iu him shows out—as in 19:12, when he made frenzied and bloody efforts to prevent the Untouchables’ spectacular mass outbreaks of devotion at the feet of the Prince of Wales, And so for many years—alternately humbugging, wheedling, spurning, and victimising these lost millions. But even the Untouchables have at last found him out—and despise him. One Untouchable union said: “We know Mr Gandhi is against us. But wc don’t care.” His public bluff is that he would “deliver” India, but what he would do is set down in his remarkable "Confession of Faith” (his considered judgment of the things necessary for India’s salvation). Some of the statements he made were: Medical science is the concentrated essence of black magic. Hospitals are the instruments that the Devil has been using for his own purpose they perpetuate vice, misery, degradation, and real slavery. India’s salvation lies in unlearning what she has learnt during the past fifty years. The railways, telegraphs hospitals, lawyers, doctors, and such like have all to go, and the so-called upper classes have to learn to live consciously, religiously, and deliberately the simple peasant life. So much for his "profound” wisdom. Gandhi, the man, is the product of Gandhi, the youth—awkward, uncouth, morbid, unhappy, and bewildered. As a barrister lie was a dismal failure. His rise to fame has been through the strangest association of accident and opportunism, for he j never attained intellectual or scholars- I I tic brilliance. j Out of this pathological stage he jwas driven irresistibly to bluff—to , pretend to be what he is not, to do what, lie cannot do. But Gandhi has a liaison with the Indian ryot masses that no other man iu the world eau rival. This wizened Hindu lias built up a contact with every caste. His bluff almost wins. I am simply a humble aspirant 1 for perfection,’’ he says. i “Foi sucli leadership as India so 1 desperately needs, Ganbi is tragi- * cally untilted.” says Professor W. H. ’

Roberts, an authority upon Indian affairs “Gandhi refused to attend the Round Table Conference," says another noted authority, "for he would have had to meet other Indians, 'dareful, beard to beard,’ as Macbeth said. He is afraid they would ‘beat him backward home.’ “Even Hindu opinion outside In dian Congress circles is hardening against him.

“Congress is internally divided. It is the object, of intense Moslem hate. It is loathed and feared by all the other minorities because it stands for Hindu domination of the rest. “In an India endowed with selfgovernment, where would Hindus be? “Gandhi has led and inspired them in all they have done. He has landed them in a mess, find lie cannot get them out of it, because be is on the horns of a dilemma.

The greatest peril to Gandhi’s reputation is that his life should be long. Every day new millions And him out. Every day the squatting saint loses some of his impressiveness. Not ftii - off, perhaps, is the gale of world-laughter that will blow Gandhi down from his perch.-—(Sydney Sun)